Estonia
Closely related to Finnish (both are Finnic languages), Estonian has one million native speakers. The two languages are members of the Uralic language family, a classification which includes some 38 languages across northern Eurasia and more than 25 million speakers. Among the Finnic languages, a subgroup of the Uralic family, only Estonian and Finnish are national languages, with the next largest, Karelian, spoken by some 36,000 people in the Republic of Karelia in the Russian Federation.
As such Estonian has a special place among Europe’s languages. Faced with stresses during the decades of Soviet immigration, where at one point just half of Estonia spoke Estonian, the language has since bounced back, with some 70% of Estonia being ethnic Estonian and many of the other, mostly Russian and Ukrainian, immigrants who have stayed learning Estonian.
One aspect of the Finnic languages is their complexity. If English has just two or three cases reserved mostly for pronouns (I > me, she > her, they > them), and Russian has six for all nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, then Estonian has a total of 14 cases and Finnish 15.
For a country the size of Estonia, the national language is of prime importance to national identity and sentiment. Estonian is now promoted by the government, and the younger generations, when opting for a foreign language to study, now generally choose English over the historically important Russian of its nearest neighbours.
Spectrum Translation has worked with Estonian since 2005. We have translated and localized Estonian for a variety of purposes, including business, legal, medical, and technical.
We welcome your queries regarding successful translation, proofreading, and editing in this unique language of the Baltic countries.